I totally agree with Stephanie Kovner-Bryant on this one. What she says also harkens back to how a traditional agency trying to be more digital needs to have a Digital Creative Director in place or they will always be playing catch-up and having strategies in place that just simply don’t work

Some, however, like Stephanie Kovner-Bryant, CEO of SKB Consulting and a former senior manager of digital marketing at Unilever, believe that the two roles aren’t redundant. She argues that since the CMO looks at long-term brand plans and strategies, it’s difficult for them to also be at the forefront of digital change.

“Having someone who’s focused on that can only help,” she said. “The chief digital officer at some companies can be more of an educator, keeping everyone abreast and explaining the pros and cons of new technologies.”

And there’s also a structural opportunity here for brands. Having a digital chief means that there’s organization and coherence of a brand’s digital strategy, as well as giving the digital team some table stakes within the company.

“Full-service” agenciesAs their margins continue to erode and the cost of acquiring new clients grows, agencies are increasingly looking for new ways upsell existing ones and to offer “one-stop” shops for their clients’ needs. The result is that many agencies refuse to specialize and instead claim to do everything well. In theory, that makes sense. Why should a client hire six different agencies if it could hire one. In practice, it doesn’t work like that. Most agencies tap major agencies primarily for a single service, like media buying or creative, but not both. Some execs argue agencies are actually better off selling themselves as specialist, rather than generalists, as the digital world continues to fragment. There will always be a place for broad strategy, they say, but execution is still best handled by specialists.

Interesting read about how brands are moving away from the need of agencies.

Agencies love “Mad Men.” One reason: It shows when they were at the zenith of their standing with clients. That’s slowly gone away, along with the culture of drinking copiously during the day.

Agencies are in a perilous position. As Digiday’s Confession series has shown, this is a known fact. At the root of all this is the tendency of agencies to cede power — to brands, to tech platforms, even to publishers. Digiday spoke with several sources on all sides of digital media — agency, brand, publisher, platform — to determine the five biggest disintermediation challenges now facing agencies.

When businesses ask for a social media strategy, what they are often really asking for is: Get me a presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like. The mantra of cultural and organisational change that is required in the social web seems to ring hollow. To be fair, it is not their fault. With a traditional business mindset it is hard to see why a presence on Twitter or Facebook is different from the corporate website. After all, these tools can seem to be just another communication channel.